Our local media – print, broadcast and online – are still excellent ways to reach people involved with the community project and attract new visitors. Not everyone’s online yet. You are though: do take a look at our Facebook page.

One of our volunteers has built up a terrific relationship with them and gains lots of publicity for the different activities and events that ATU runs. Here’s a piece published today about a screening of The Eagle of the Ninth, based on Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic tale which visited our villa site.

There’ll also be a talk by Andy Brockman, who specialises in community archaeology and the Archaeology of Modern Conflict.

All Because of Tutankhamun?

Here’s another contribution with thoughts about promotion from Dr Lesley Hardy:

‘I’m writing this in a brief break from a longer writing task. Two weeks of study leave is hopefully going to allow me to make some further headway looking at the culture which took place in the 1920s.

In part, the appetite for all things archaeological was linked to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 but I argue its roots go back much further into the C19th and are also explained by the shifts that take place in culture and society post-WW1.

In order to trace these changes and their significance for how we look at archaeology today, I’m following the excavation of the Roman villa site at Folkestone. These were excavated by S.E. Winbolt in 1924 and in many ways epitomise the turn towards the promotion and integration of archaeology (especially, I think, Romano-British archaeology) through a wide range of media – newspapers, books, radio even.

The Earliest Heritage Site?

In other words, Folkestone is one of the first ‘Heritage sites’ in the country.

Must get back to the job in hand – production of this article: ‘The Romans in Folkestone: S.E. Winbolt and the evolution of Public Archaeology in the 1920s.”